Friday, March 23, 2007

patterns & practices Guidance Explorer is a tool that enables discovery, composition and consumption of high quality development guidance. Guidance Explorer installs with a connection to the patterns & practices guidance library including performance and security topics for .NET, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET applications. The guidance library contains a variety of guidance types including checklists and guidelines covering design, implementation and deployment topics.

Seva CafeSeva Café is an experiment in the joys of giving and of selfless service. Run mostly by volunteers, our wholesome meals are cooked with love and served with love, offered to you as a genuine gift. To complete the full circle of giving and to sustain this experiment, we leave it to you to pay from your heart. All profits are used to support social service projects.Seva Café invites you to feel at home and engage in inspiring conversation. We welcome you to feed your mind and your soul by taking the idea of selfless service beyond our walls, into your daily life and into your community.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

The Best Practice Analyzer ASP.NET (alpha release) is a tool that scans the configuration of an ASP.NET 2.0 application. The tool can scan against three mainline scenarios (hosted environment, production environment, or development environment) and identify problematic configuration settings in the machine.config or web.config files associated with your ASP.NET application. This is an alpha release intended to gain feedback on the tool and the configuration rules included with it.

Optimization

Web Page Analyzer - This tool is fairly comprehensive and may be the only one you really need for website speed analysis. Includes stats on every file and object downloaded and provides approximate download times for different connection rates.

OctaGate Site Timer - This one to be as accurate as the first one because it attempted to download images referenced in my CSS files that were commented out. However, it provides a nicer graphical output that marks when the request was started, when it connected, and the time when the first and last bytes were received. It also highlights 404 errors in red, which is handy for finding missing files or bad URLs.

Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer - if you’re hardcore about your image compression, you should check out Ken Silverman’s Utility Page. But if you’re like me and just want a quick and easy web based utility for compressing images, this is your site. It can convert gif, jpg, and png files up to 300kb. It will also do conversions to other image types and display multiple results at various color levels and compression rates so you can pick the best one for your needs.

Javascript Minimizer - This is an extremely simple tool. Paste in your javascript and click the button and reduce the size of your javascripts.

CSS Minimizer - Just like the Javascript minimizer, but for Cascading Style Sheets.

Google Analytics - A free and full featured analytics package for your blog or website. Add some javascript to your page template and you’re in information overload land, but done up with nice charts and graphs.

103bees Search traffic analysis- Unlike other stats packages, this one is focused purely on natural search engine traffic analytics. What are users searching for when they land on your site? This is a nice complement to Google Analytics. And it’s free! One caveat is that the script can be slow sometimes, which can play havoc with CSS based designs.

Spicing Up Your Posts With Images

Wikipedia Public Domain Image Resources - Images can bring a blog post to life. But rather than worrying about receiving a cease and desist letter for misusing copyrighted material, why not use images that are part of the Public Domain? This page is chock full of links to resources for free images.

PicFindr - Despite it’s “Oh so Web 2.0” name (must everything end in a consonant plus “r” these days? At least it doesn’t have BETA anywhere), this tool is really great. It will search a set of free photo sites such as Stock.xchng, for free photographs.

Flickr Creative Commons - Still haven’t found that picture that just hits the point you’re trying to make? Try the Flickr Creative Commons search engine. Remember, these photos are not public domain. You do need to abide by the license. But for the most part, the licenses are pretty lenient for you to reuse the photos in your own blog.

Open Clip Art Library - Maybe you want your image to be iconic rather than photographic. Check out this free Public Domain clip art library to find an icon for every occasion.

WP Clipart - Another Public Domain clip art library, though the quality tends to be less than the Open Clip Art Library.

Create and Improve Your Content

Cliche Finder - Try to avoid using too many tired old cliches by running your post through this web based utility.

HallwayTesting.com - This is a fantastic site for basic hallway usability testing. Just submit your URL and real people will post comments with criticisms and praise for your site. The more specific you are about what you want testers to focus on, the better quality the feedback. Try it out.

Syndication

FeedBurner - This one gets special mention because it fits in so many categories. It’ll help optimize your bandwidth by serving your RSS feeds for you. Also, it includes a basic free stats package as well as a premium stats package that can replace Google Analytics. FeedBurner can also provide features your blogging platform might not, such as subscribing to RSS Feeds via email.

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